The World Bank’s arbitration tribunal has ordered Argentina to pay $320 million plus interest and legal fees to Spanish travel group Marsans for expropriating its airline Aerolineas Argentinas SA in 2008, a local newspaper reported on Saturday.

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) ruled against Argentina for "illegally expropriating the investments" of Marsans, the tribunal was quoted saying in daily newspaper Clarin.

ICSID and a spokesperson for the office of Argentine President Mauricio Macri did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Argentina’s former President Cristina Fernandez ordered the state seizure of the airline in 2008, alleging mismanagement. It has remained under state control since then.

Pro-business Macri has been trying to dismantle state controls on the economy implemented during Fernandez’s government since taking office in 2015.

That concern is a real and serious one, but there is also a more direct and crude problem: parties (or their lawyers) bribing, or making backdoor deals with, the arbitrators to secure a favorable outcome.

Crystallex — owed $1.4 billion for the expropriation of its Venezuela mining subsidiary — has moved U.S. Federal Court in Delaware to seize Petroleos de Venezuela Holding, the parent company of PDVSA’s American unit Citgo Holding.

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